Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill return to Doctor Who

Former Doctor Who stars Karen Gillan and Arthur Darvill will return for a look behind the scenes of the BBC's long-running science fiction show as part of a docu-series.
They will celebrate 20 years since Doctor Who's Cardiff-based revival by taking part in a special episode of Doctor Who: Unleashed, a series that delves into the BBC show.
Scottish actress Gillan and English actor Darvill portrayed Amy Pond and Rory Williams, who were the companions when The Crown and House Of The Dragon star Matt Smith was the 11th Doctor in the 2010s.
Since leaving the show, Darvill has won an Olivier Award for his turn as Curly McLain in Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! and Gillan has been in the blockbuster franchises Guardians Of The Galaxy and Jumanji.
She played Amy as a policewoman kissagram who met the Doctor when she was a small child, and remained on the show for two series alongside Birmingham-born Darvill as her panicky husband.
The hour-long episode of Doctor Who: Unleashed will also see other iterations of the Doctor past and present - including Ncuti Gatwa, who currently plays the 15th Doctor, David Tennant, who has been the 10th and 14th Doctor, and Jodie Whittaker, who played the 13th Doctor - discuss the series.
Also appearing will be people who are and have portrayed companions such as Varada Sethu, who is in the current series with Gatwa, Billie Piper and Mandip Gill, along with current and former showrunners Steven Moffat, Chris Chibnall and Russell T Davies.
Presenter Steffan Powell promises "secrets" from the show by talking with former production designer Edward Thomas and costume designer Ray Holman, as well as unpacking what Wales has brought to the programme since it was revived in 2005.
Since the time-travelling series was brought back two decades ago, after being on pause since the 1990s, Christopher Eccleston played the ninth Doctor for one season, before Tennant took on the role and continued for a spell with Piper playing his companion, Rose Tyler.
Gatwa has played the Time Lord across two series since fellow Scottish actor Tennant bi-generated in 2023.
His character is set to have a "high-stakes showdown" in his latest season's finale The Reality War on Saturday.
The episode of Doctor Who: Unleashed will air on BBC One Wales and BBC Three on Tuesday.

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Irish Times

an hour ago

• Irish Times

Why there is more to soccer jerseys today than mere colours, fabrics and tribalism

Joey D'Urso is showing me football jerseys, lifting them up to the screen from his sunny London apartment. Among them are Venezia, Aston Villa and Schalke. To the uninitiated, his haul might seem excessive. Yet, these shirts have been but a fraction of those D'Urso has collated over the past five years. D'Urso is senior data journalist at The Times of London, but he previously worked as a political correspondent for the BBC and an investigations writer for The Athletic. He regularly worked on stories about how Asian gambling companies came to dominate the Premier League , Saudi Arabia's growing influence on sport in general, and the nature of how jersey sponsors are chosen to represent more than modified trims, polyester collars and the colours that will go on to trace a young person's life. That led to him writing More than a Shirt: How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money and Power, a new investigative book set on tracing the lines between the seemingly innocuous colour combinations and a nation's fiscal struggles, social values and political ideologies as geopolitical issues seep into every aspect of the beautiful game. Partly, the task was personal. 'It's such a cliche,' D'Urso says, 'But it's so much more than football [to me]. It's like the North Star in my life. And I think that's true for so many people. Like, my family have all moved houses, relatives have died, all those sorts of things ... but I will always have one physical place that will be the same as when I went for the first time when I was four. And that's my community.' READ MORE For most of football's history, the idea of a non-partisan recognition would have been beyond belief. From its earliest days, the game was a tribal affair, defined by who is in and, more importantly, who is out. In the modern era, D'Urso argues, the cultural currency of jerseys has given credence to a universality, allowing us, in no small way, to think about one singular idea in a world divided. 'Culture is entirely fragmented at the minute,' he says. 'If you see, say, a great TV programme, there are so many streaming platforms now that chances are your friend isn't subscribed to the same thing. Same with music, art ... [but] football runs counter to that.' Joey D'Urso: 'I wasn't expecting to see a football shirt with a Pablo Escobar protege on the back' Yet, with this, the possibility for infiltration runs deep. With 3.5 billion fans worldwide and a vintage jerseys market booming, the ability to connect millions of fans with a positive idea of totalitarianism or climate change has never been easier. 'This Schalke jersey has Gazprom across the front, which is a Russian gas company, and it kind of tells the story of how Russia , essentially, bought off Germany through cheap gas,' D'Urso says. 'That manifested itself in Germany basically being soft on Russia compared to other European countries. Then, when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, this all imploded spectacularly. Lionel Messi, right. of Barcelona celebrates with Cesc Fabregas after scoring against AC Milan in the Champions League in 2012. Photograph: Manuel Queimadelos Alonso/Getty 'In Germany today, there are people with this shirt with a blue sticker over it, because they're embarrassed to be wearing something that's deeply linked to the invasion of Ukraine.' In Medellín, Colombia, the methods were more subtle. 'An old kit from Envigado FC features a little silhouette of a man on the back,' D'Urso says with a smile. 'That man was a drug warlord whose son, the owner of the club, ordered him to be on it to honour his father. The club was later sanctioned by the American government for big-time organised crime, resulting in the club not being allowed to have any sponsors for years. And that club is where James Rodriguez, top scorer at 2014 World Cup, got his start. But yeah ... I wasn't expecting to see a football shirt with a Pablo Escobar protege on the back.' Even clubs that seemed untouchable weren't immune to political agendas. 'Barcelona at one stage didn't have a sponsor,' he says. 'And then suddenly they had Unicef, and they actually paid Unicef . And this was worn by the best football team of all time: Messi, Iniesta, Guardiola. In his book, D'Urso urges readers to look at the examples he shares to change the way we might see the world 'But then, when Qatar was awarded the World Cup in 2010, Barcelona suddenly had Qatar Foundation and Qatar Airways on their shirt. In that way, sponsors in particular and shirts in general, kind of have the ability to warn you of the future. From lofty ideals to selling out to a Middle Eastern oil state.' These globalising impulses have undoubtedly shaped all sport, not just soccer. However, what brings it closer to home for Irish fans is the Borders chapter, framed around Rangers FC and Club Deportivo Palestino. 'Football is often the embodiment of borders,' D'Urso says. 'And, weirdly, from what I understand, it's that the better the politics become [of a place], the more toxic the football is. Club Deportivo Palestino, in Santiago, has a huge Palestinian diaspora, and they recently had green and white in their kit because they have a kind of link with the fan base of Celtic . It's people expressing their identity. And, to me, it's better that people do that through football than through like, violence in the streets.' Inevitably, kits will continue to fascinate for some time – perhaps as the single unifying act of an unstable sport in an unstable world. As a tribalist among the like-minded, D'Urso urges 3.5 billion of his closest friends to take the 22 examples he shares in the book to change the way one might see the world. 'Every shirt tells a different story,' he says, with a smile. 'With this book, I'd like to give people the tools to find out those stories for themselves.' More than a Shirt: How Football Shirts Explain Global Politics, Money and Power by Joey D'Urso is published by Seven Dials and is available in bookshops

Irish Examiner

5 hours ago

• Irish Examiner

Reasons to be Cheerful: Cork artist Noël O'Callaghan on her new exhibition and musical past

Noël O'Callaghan has always worked across a range of media, in music, theatre and the visual arts. The breadth of her interests is reflected in Reasons to be Cheerful, the title of her solo exhibition of landscape and portrait paintings at the Lavit Gallery in Cork. Reasons to be Cheerful (Part 3) was the title of one of Ian Dury and the Blockheads' best-known singles, which reached No 3 in 1979. 'But I was also thinking of one of my favourite Samuel Beckett plays,' says O'Callaghan. 'In Happy Days, the main character, Winnie, is buried up to her waist in sand at the start, and up to her neck at the end. But she still finds ways to be cheerful, like putting on her lipstick, and singing. It's simultaneously noble and pathetic.' O'Callaghan grew up in an artistic household in Cork city. Her father Diarmuid O'Ceallachain was a professional artist and educator who'd studied under Seán Keating and Maurice MacGonigal at the National College of Art and Design in Dublin, while her mother Joan O'Sullivan often modelled for his paintings. 'Even when I was a pre-verbal baby,' she says, 'my mother would be introducing me to my dad's landscapes. She'd have me up on her hip and be pointing things out to me. I learned the world through those paintings, really. Those little marks that represented a tree or something became more real to me than the real world.' One of Noël O'Callaghan's pieces in her Reasons to be Cheerful exhibition. O'Callaghan's father taught painting at the Crawford School of Art and Design from 1940 to 1970, and she won a place to study there herself in the late 1970s. 'I was quite young, so I had a romantic idea of what it might be like,' she says. 'But I found it quite repressive. They kept saying things like, we can fail you. I was rebellious, and I found that being given a piece of paper to say you were an artist grossly offended my sensibilities. All my class had a very hard time. We were the punk generation, and we didn't like this authoritarian attitude. Maybe it's changed now. I would hope so. 'But anyway, I put up some cartoons about the system, and I was given an ultimatum; I could conform or get out. So I left. I went on to UCC and studied English and History. I got interested in drama, and after college, I got a job acting with Graffiti Theatre Company.' O'Callaghan was restless, however, and she soon decamped for West Berlin. 'We were living with a wall around us,' she says. 'It was like an island. But rents were cheap, and there were an awful lot of empty buildings, so it was very easy to get space for band rehearsal rooms and artists' studios.' O'Callaghan flat-shared with a German woman. 'And that's how I learned the language,' she says. 'I was lucky enough to get a job in a theatre company, and I did that for a while. But then, again, I found that a bit restrictive as well. So I worked in pubs and did some English teaching, and focused on playing music.' O'Callaghan and her partner Douglas Henderson started a band called Alice Brennan, in which she sang and played percussion. 'We were a three-piece initially, with another guy named Mathias. We played Turkish-Irish speed folk, and that, for me, was really liberating. We wrote our own songs, and toured all over the place. When the wall came down, we became a nine-piece and toured East Germany.' A self-portrait by Noël O'Callaghan. O'Callaghan returned to Cork when her father fell ill in the early 1990s. He died in 1993, and her mother passed a year later. 'I stayed on in my family home after that, and immersed myself in painting. I did a lot of plein air painting, and life drawings. I had a life drawing group, and I did a a public life drawing event called Live as part of the Dublin Theatre Festival in 1995. 'To this day, I still do a lot of outdoor watercolour sketches, but lately I've been painting landscapes in the studio as well. The paintings I'm making are kind of a distillation of the field work I've done over the years, the actual plein air painting. There would be examples of the plein air painting in the show, but a lot of the more recent landscapes are distillations, I suppose.' O'Callaghan also began making self-portraits. 'The first one I painted was on Christmas Day in 1994. I'd always spent Christmas with my parents, and that was the first Christmas I'd ever in my life spent alone. So I decided to paint a portrait of myself, and I called it The First Noël. And then, after that, I'd paint a self-portrait every Christmas Day, and sometimes I'd paint one on New Year's Day or on my birthday as well. There's a handful of those portraits in the Lavit exhibition.' O'Callaghan returned to Berlin in 2000, where she continued to paint and make music, but she and Henderson have recently settled in West Cork. 'I came back to Ireland, basically, because I wanted to get away from fascist Germany,' she says. 'Germany is re-militarising, and it's scary, you know? I couldn't live there anymore.' The two now perform as the Vangardaí, playing what they describe as 'dystopfolk for the masses.' They have also collaborated on a multi-media project called Feathers for Rosa, a tribute to the Polish-born Marxist revolutionary, Rosa Luxembourg. 'We put that on in the New Theatre in Dublin in March 2024,' says O'Callaghan. 'The piece is about anti-militarism, really, and the futility of war. We're performing it on Skerkin Island on July 20 and at Uillinn for the Skibbereen Arts Festival on August 2.' Painting continues to occupy most of O'Callaghan's time. 'Some of my paintings take 25 years to finish,' she says. 'I can never throw anything away. I took a bunch of half-finished paintings back to Berlin with me in 2000, and then I shipped them back again two years ago. I finished some of them recently, but there's lots more upstairs. I plan to finish them one day.' Noël O'Callaghan, Reasons to be Cheerful runs at the Lavit Gallery, Cork until July 12.

The Irish Sun

7 hours ago

• The Irish Sun

Love Island ‘bullying' row sparked as Shakira and Toni ‘gang up' on Emily in ‘uncomfortable' scenes

LOVE Island is embroiled in a 'bullying' row that has left viewers feeling 'uncomfy'. The ITV2 show's fresh bullying row has seemingly been sparked by Shakira and Toni after they went up against Emily in Sunday night's instalment of Love Island. 5 Toni previously said Emily was annoying because of he 'Little Miss Sunshine' persona Credit: Eroteme 5 Shakira and Toni aren't Emily's biggest fans Credit: Eroteme 5 Shakira pulled Emily aside for a chat Credit: Eroteme 5 The two women chatted, though didn't agree Credit: Eroteme Shakira, 22, and Toni, 24, were seen 'ganging up' on Emily, 24, in 'uncomfortable' scenes. On Friday night, Toni seemingly accused Emily of being nosey, with the two women going head to head. Toni was seen chatting to Meg saying: "I can't listen to her. 'Little Miss Sunshine' all the time." Elsewhere in the episode, Toni said: "Emily's just f**king nosey." Read More about Love Island And then, in tonight's episode, things came to a head when Shakira got involved. 'I feel like in situations, it's a case of reading the room a little bit…I feel like you've not made an effort with us,' Shakira said to Emily. Later when Shakira mentions Toni having a bad day, Emily hits back. "Just cause she's in a bad mood doesn't mean I can't be in a good mood…you should have come to me," Emily said. Most read in Love Island The two don't agree and leave things there but when Shakira hears Emily telling the group about their conversation, the argument is reignited. Shakira then pulled Emily aside to say she sometimes finds her "bitchy". Saucy sex position dare sparks Love Island row as TWO couples are on the rocks after spin the bottle game She explained how sometimes it feels like Emily will tell the other girls stuff that has been said. Emily then said that she didn't feel this was true. "What's with the bullying in this villa????" asked one person on X as the scenes played out. "So uncomfy to watch. All the girls just bullying one another it's disgusting," added a second. Love Island 2025 full lineup : A 30-year-old footballer with charm to spare. : A 22-year-old Manchester-based model, ready to turn heads. : A payroll specialist from Southampton, looking for someone tall and stylish. : International business graduate with brains and ambition. : A gym enthusiast with a big heart. : A Londoner with celebrity connections, aiming to find someone funny or Northern. : An Irish actress already drawing comparisons to Maura Higgins. : A personal trainer and semi-pro footballer, following in his footballer father's footsteps. : A towering 6'5' personal trainer. : A 25-year-old Irish rugby pro. : Love Island's first bombshell revealed as sexy Las Vegas pool party waitress. : The 24-year-old bombshell hails from London and works as a commercial banking executive. : A teaching assistant from Broxbourne, Hertfordshire, who entered Love Island 2025 as a bombshell . : Works as a scaffolder day-to-day and plays semi-pro football on the side. : Pro footballer and model entering Love Island 2025 as a bombshell. Departures : : Axed after an arrest over a machete attack emerged. He was released with no further action taken and denies any wrongdoing. : A model and motivational speaker who has overcome adversity after suffering life-changing burns in an accident. : A boxer with striking model looks, seeking love in the villa. A third then slammed: "Bullying at its b**ches." While a fourth wrote: "What the hell is that argument about then with shakira, Toni and Emily? It's about nothing. "All it looks like is both Toni and Shakira are bullying Emily." A fifth then penned: "No not being funny but any girls would go tell their girls about an argument they had just had. "Toni and shakira are the real bullies here." While a sixth said: "Emily hasn't done anything to deserve this. "Shakira and Toni are bullies. Simple. So unattractive." 5 Emily has divided her castmates and viewers at home Credit: Eroteme